Various embodiments of the present invention relate to wireless communication devices, mobile devices, and wireless communication systems, that facilitate selection of mobile applications and related services, and more specifically, to location-based selection of mobile web applications and services.
The primary method of accessing mobile web applications and mobile web sites—entering a URL—suffers from two primary drawbacks. First, users may not know the appropriate URL for the application or service they want to access. Second, manually typing URLs on mobile devices is slow and cumbersome.
Previous and current approaches primarily rely on alternative approaches to discovering and entering URLs. For example, mobile devices can use infrared beacons and RFID tags as a way to discover URLs for local services. As other examples, mobile devices can use readers of QR codes to discover URLs for local services or can use Near-Field Communication to detect URLs using device sensors. However, these approaches normally require that users have a line of sight or direct physical proximity to the source of the QR codes or other markers, and thus are not always easily accessible, or even easily discoverable, by users.